Before It Becomes Words

I went into a bookshop in the middle of a walk.

There was nothing I meant to buy. I just stood in front of the shelves and read the spines from one end to the other.

What was gathered there were words I would never think to search for. Authors unknown to me. Fields I had no plans to read about. Books of a thickness I would never pick up.

Which is obvious. A bookshop shelf is not arranged around my interests.

And yet the obviousness of it felt oddly fresh. Why should that be?

For the past few years, anything I do not know has become something I can know almost at once. I ask, and an answer comes back. The answer arrives already shaped for me. Fitted to my situation, matched to the way I speak, arranged so that I can take it in without effort.

This is a wonderful thing. In terms of efficiency there is nothing to complain about. I am helped by it nearly every day.

Still, standing there at the shelves, a thought arrived.

I believe I am thinking for myself, and yet most of the material I think with reaches me already tailored to my shape.

Social media works the same way. What I want to see gathers. It grows comfortable. My world slowly comes to resemble me.

So there must be some value in standing, on purpose, in a place that has nothing to do with me.

Open a phone and a video appears that compresses a film into a few minutes. Who did what, how it ended. As information, that is enough.

But it is nothing like two hours inside a cinema.

The lights go down. I cannot move. I cannot skip ahead. Even the dull stretches have to be sat through. And then that slightly dazed lift on the way back out into the street. If someone asks what was good about it, I cannot answer well.

Those two hours cannot be summarized. Or rather, whatever vanishes in the summary was probably the part that mattered.

Drawing is the same. A single work takes hours. Sometimes days. Measured by efficiency, nothing could be worse. And still, there are things that happen only inside that time.

Why does the black belong here. Why will my hand not stop today. While I am drawing, I can explain none of it.

We have lived a long time surrounded by instruments of measurement. Grades, results, followers, view counts. Numbers are not the problem. Without some standard, nothing in a society moves.

The trouble is that a tool for measuring quietly turns into a device for scoring myself.

And AI fits this structure a little too well. Decide what counts as correct, and it will move toward that answer at a speed that is difficult to believe.

So what stays with me is not that AI is becoming better than people at things. It is that people are drifting toward the shape of AI.

I am not free of this either. Once a work is shown, the response is visible. Some drawings travel far. Others sink quietly. Perhaps this is the kind people want. The thought arrives on its own.

If I go on drawing with only that to steer by, a day will come when I can no longer tell what I want to draw from what will be well received.

And when I do show a work, I put words on it. I give it a title, I write a description, I speak about what it means.

The thing that never became words the whole time I was drawing. At the very end, I turn it into words with my own hands.

Having thought that far, something occurred to me.

Perhaps what makes a life feel worth living is a sensation from before it becomes words.

The moment it becomes words, it turns into an explanation, into a purpose, into something that can be compared. By the time I can state my reasons, I have already begun to care more about the reasons.

Those few minutes in front of the shelves. The way the street felt on the way out of the cinema. They carry no name and no score. Nobody is going to praise them.

And still, inside the person living them, something is certainly moving.

There was never any real need to worry about this. Detours, and things that take a long time, used to sit everywhere in ordinary life.

Now that answers arrive fitted to my shape, the detour has become the one thing I have to choose deliberately or never have at all.

I left the bookshop and started walking again. In the end I bought nothing. And yet those few minutes in front of the shelves are still with me.

I want these drawings and words to travel openly, and to reach the people who may need them.

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Thank you for reading.